Well Bottom Blues

Hokusai’s The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa

Through the lens of imminent disaster Fuji—the anchoring backdrop of ten thousand pastoral moments–—is a disinterested bystander. The mountainous water towers over the iconic peak and the doomed boats. The sailor’s backs are turned to the crest of threatening fingers, their hands clasped in muscular prayer to the task of rowing. They did not choose the sea. It is the world they were granted by their ancestors, rain on their fields and fish in the sea. The sky is a mirror of the sea, sometimes placid and other times fierce with wind, and where else shall they live except between the sky and the sea, those promising and pitiless fields of blue? They know the tales of typhoon and tsunami, whole villages swallowed by the sea, coasts given over to ghosts. Still, they rise up with the sun and go down to their boats. When confronted with the Great Wave, there is nothing to do but row.

This is an old piece, the first draft written for one of my blogs in the era of the the Federal Flood after Hurricane Katrina. There aren’t many journals of ekphrasti  poetry to which to submit something like this, and all the ejphrastic contests give you a piece of art to work from so I’m just going to put this here.